Fibre Channel Over Ethernet - the way forward?

http://www.primenewswire.com/newsroom/news.html?d=139676

ORLANDO, Fla., April 8, 2008 (PRIME NEWSWIRE) — Storage Networking World — QLogic Corp. (Nasdaq:QLGC), a leader in networking for storage and high performance computing (HPC), today announced that NetApp and QLogic are demonstrating the industry’s first end-to-end 8Gb Fibre Channel network to include native 8Gb Fibre Channel storage. For the first time, customers can see the full power of 8Gb Fibre Channel networks powered by QLogic(r) SANbox(r) 5800 Series switches, 2500 Series host bus adapters (HBAs) and 8Gb storage from NetApp. The two companies are also demonstrating the benefits of unified data and storage networks, showcasing the new QLogic 8000 Series converged network adapters (CNAs) and native Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) storage from NetApp. Both demonstrations will provide customers with a glimpse at each network’s ability to enhance data center IT flexibility and efficiency in virtualized environments.

“Data center managers need flexible solutions tailored to their specific application environment,” said Patrick Rogers, vice president of Solutions Marketing at NetApp. “At SNW, we’re teaming with QLogic to demonstrate NetApp’s ongoing leadership in advanced storage networking by delivering the only unified platform that supports 8Gb Fibre Channel solutions for customers expanding their current SAN architecture, and demonstrating native FCoE solutions to leverage the economics and simplicity of Ethernet fabrics.”

Great news, the more solutions around the Fibre over Ethernet platform, the more solutions and buy in we have to present to the end user community. The key thing with this is that Fibre Channel over Ethernet allows us to unify the storage and network connectivity without threatening ‘the way we do things’, I can still have a storage team, I can still have a networks team. The difference will be storage focus on storage, on carving up and allocating storage, on availability, capacity and meeting the business needs, the actual port allocation, the patching etc can be handled by the networks guy. The key concept being that instead of having two separate functions to patch the server to the network, to patch the server to the storage, I can have one task, one accountable unit, to patch in the server, the rest is up to networks allocating the right ports and linking that port into the SAN storage. Very cool. Do check it out.